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Living full time with his father, a small-time entrepreneur who had once been Rita Hayworth's business manager, the teenage Ellroy discovered a taste for Hardy Boys novels and trouble. He was kicked out of high school for misbehavior and then out of the U.S. Army--after an ill-considered enlistment--when he feigned uncontrollable stuttering and ran naked about his boot camp. He got home in time to care for and then bury his father, dead of a series of strokes and heart attacks, and to lapse into a lost decade of what he calls "booze and drugs and Mickey Mouse crimes." At 27 he blacked out and was rushed to a hospital, where post-alcoholic brain syndrome was diagnosed. Eventually he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, took caddying jobs to support himself and mustered the courage to start writing his first mystery novel.
The steady ascent of Ellroy's career was abetted by a flair for self-promotion. He told everyone who would listen about his checkered past and posed as the tough ex-hood who was going to raze the house of crime fiction. Reporters who interviewed him found strange messages on their answering machines: "It's James Ellroy. Woof, woof! Demon Dog of American Literature."
Ellroy now seems embarrassed at such bravado. "It was a way of getting attention," he says. "Actually, as a criminal I was a joke. After the profligate way I've lived, I fear disorder." He keeps it at bay through hard work-at least five hours a day scrawling block letters on three-hole notebook paper-and quiet living. He and his second wife, journalist and author Helen Knode, are buying a house in Kansas City, Missouri, where her mother lives. "It's peaceful there," Ellroy says. "It's normal."
American Tabloid is the first installment of a trilogy he plans to call Underworld, U.S.A. "The next one will begin 15 minutes after the first one ends and run through 1968. The third will pick up there and finish in 1973." Vietnam. More assassinations. Watergate. Years of work "swimming around," as he says, "in the gutter of history." Does he have, for old time's sake, anything outrageous to say? Ellroy pauses for a beat: "I think American Tabloid is an outrageously great book." That is not, come to think of it, such a wild surmise.